Tuesday, April 24, 2012

To Mountshannon not by boat

Turf just cut on the bog

The cycling enthusiasm knows no bounds! Never mind that we have to heave ourselves up an outrageous hill to get out of the place. Once on the top it's worth every bit of sweat. On Saturday we turned right at Ryan's Bridge, up the hill (Oh gods will I make it?), then turn right through Corrakyle and keep going til we hit the bog.

The road back, and our valley in the distance

Looking back we can see our valley way off in the distance. Fields are green down there, and the Asness River, which we're at the top of now, turns into a series of wild waterfalls.

The tarmac finishes just about here, and we're onto a rough track winding between hillocks still brown with winter. A pair of ravens tumble and squabble in the wind which is thankfully at our backs. And onward! Mountshannon calls.

Lough Derg

After the bleak beauty of the mountain we join the tarmac coming up from the other side and it's all downhill. Lough Derg flashes blue, a great expanse of water we don't normally see from up here. A reward of coffee in The Gallery, a couple of purchases at the Mountshannon Farmer's Market held in The Snug every Saturday, then on to Scarriff. Oh my legs. We choose to go via the quieter Middle Line, but it's very up and down with the ups seeming steep steep steep.

We cheated. We brought the car with bike rack to Scarriff before we set out. I don't think we'd have managed the big haul back up to our house. But next time! Definitely. We did 29 km. Oh so smug and happy.

And another reward. The Snug Restaurant is open again under the capable management of Molly who ran a stall on Killaloe Market for years. Hurray! Saturday night dinner out.

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About Me

Two blogs now.
Floating Boater is mostly about our life on the waterways of Ireland on Winter Solstice, our timber cruiser. She's a Rampart 32 built in 1969 in Southampton. She was one of the last this size to come out of the Rampart boatyard – plastic was the material of the future. So a classic but with a definite sixties bent.
Every summer we take off on the astonishingly varied waterways of Ireland and enter another, sweeter world. In between I tend my vegetables, look after our acre or so of garden in East Clare, write poetry, and teach and play flute. I occasionally have to do other paid work too.
We're on the move from our present house and I have a new acre to begin. So Mucky Fingernails is the gardening wing. It's a record of the creation of a new garden, starting from an open field.